Something unsavoury appears to surround him. Father Flynn’s funeral wake is a solemn but an undercooked affair, and the ritual meant to mark his death and celebrate his life is marked by a lack of mourners. Instead, the sherry and crackers are a sort of secular reminder of this tradition, but a sidestepping of it. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne’er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence.

We have wine and wafers here, but this is no Holy Communion or Eucharist, that Catholic ritual which Father Flynn would have administered hundreds of times during his life. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace. His newest novel is Undermajordomo Minor. Born in British Columbia, he has also lived in California and Washington, and now resides in Portland, Oregon. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down behind her sister. Patrick deWitt is the author of the critically acclaimed Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, as well as The Sisters Brothers, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them.

Then, at her sister’s bidding, she filled out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. I groped my way towards my usual chair in the corner while Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state.

The sisters brothers novel